Arab comics began in Cairo in the 1880s with karikatur (political cartoons) and with Yaacub Sanua, whose periodical Abu Naddara (The Man with the Glasses) and later spin-offs lambasted Egypt’s khedive, Ismail Pasha, in drawings and texts. Sanua’s anti-establishment, anti-imperial view led to his publications being banned (1). At the same time, Ottoman publications, influenced by French and British caricatures, took off in Istanbul and travelled across the Ottoman empire, aiming at those in power. Sanua’s caricatures and Ottoman works, among them Hayal (daydream) and Istikbal (the future), both founded in 1875, were strikingly similar to contemporaneous drawings in Europe such as those by James Gillray and André Gill (2).

With new popular glossy magazines in Cairo in the 1920s — some in colour, most with photographs — cartoons, comic strips and caricature joined the elite reading list. Every week there were caricatures on covers and on nearly every page inside; new humour publications sprouted, following the style of the New Yorker and Punch, mocking the elites. And at the same time, adventure stories and pulp periodicals were published for children. By the 1950s and 60s, the two forms collided, drawing on western comics and local storytelling traditions — as comics for children. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Arabic children’s comics were popular during the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolt in Egypt, which strengthened Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism under Gamal Abdel Nasser: children’s publications were an excellent teaching aid for patriarchal ideas, Arab traditions and local culture.

“Nahas Pasha (The Model), as seen by the Art Students,” 1965, Alexander Saroukhan

All periodicals were nationalised during the 1967 war with Israel, and children’s publications worked for the pan-Arab cause; in 1968 issues of the locally produced Arabic Mickey (Mouse, the Disney character) magazine, top cartoonists such as Bahgat Osman ran politically charged strips beside translated stories of Disney favourites. One Arabised strip is Mounir the Little Hero, a child in a keffiyeh who causes a ruckus like Dennis the Menace, except that he plays his tricks on Israeli tanks and security officers. In the 1970s, comic books told Nasser’s story, and his likeness often appeared on the covers of children’s magazines such as Mickey or Samir.

Editorial cartooning and comic strips have hybridised in the past decade, with an alt-comic movement in the Middle East and North Africa, and illustrators penning subversive comics for adults. (In Arabic they’re known as rasamin komiks, illustrators of comics, or fananin komiks, comic artists). In 2008 the authorities quickly banned the first Egyptian graphic novel (3). Since then, collectives from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia have experimented with the form.

Providing political space

That comics are often dismissed as childish gives contemporary artists more space to address politically disruptive topics such as police brutality or sexual harassment. Usually written in colloquial Arabic, graphic narratives for adults are in the style of American alt-comic innovators R Crumb or Lynda Barry. Independent collectives publish them in small runs, and they have become instant cult classics and inspirations to millennials. Cairo’s Tok Tok and Beirut’s Samandal are sold in cafes, galleries and bookstores. Tok Tok costs 10 Egyptian pounds (half a dollar), affordable by Egyptian art students and amateur illustrators. Last September its founders reissued the long-sold-out inaugural issues from 2011-2 as a book, on sale at downtown artists’ hangouts.

Illustration for “Déraisons d’être”, 1938, Kamel al-Telmissany

Centre Pompidou

“Self portrait with Spider”, 1945, Adham Wanly

Abushâdy archive

To collect the region’s zines — such as Tunis’s Lab619 or Casablanca’s SkefKef or Baghdad’s Mesaha — you have to travel to openings in those cities or attend the annual Cairo Comix festival, where the vanguard gathers to exchange its latest works. During the rest of the year, Cairo’s booksellers offer recent publications. Among them are the Alexandrian artist Mai Koraiem’s 2015 graphic novel Cavafis (a bio-comic of poet Constantine P Cavafy) and Mostafa Youssef’s elegant narrative Ialu, an ancient Egyptian word for ‘field of dreams’. New graphic novels are mostly niche publications for the literati. But the two volumes of Islam Gawish’s strips, Al-Warka (The Paper), are a national sensation (4). Over 24,000 copies of his stick-figure books have been printed — and there are many pirated editions on downtown newsstands — making Gawish one of Egypt’s best-selling authors. He has 2.2 million Facebook followers and a celebrity status that transcends that of political cartoonists in the pre-Internet era.

The same tyrants are refusing to leave their thrones, and the youth are still dreaming of a nation they can be proud of and have a say in

Cairo’s news kiosks mostly stock a more mainstream approach. This month, a new volume of pro-government caricatures by the state newspaper cartoonist Amro Fahmy is stacked on the pavement alongside Arabic translations of Disney characters and Marvel superheroes. Flattering caricatures of Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, sometimes appear on the covers of children’s comics. That might seem a bizarre civics lesson to outsiders, but not in the context of the history described above.

A second origin story

There is another origin story for the comics, which goes back to artists in Cairo during the 1930s and 40s — the Art and Liberty Group of experimental writers and painters, Egyptian surrealists with a radical approach to modern art. They sought a new, uninhibited visual language, inspired by the writings of Albert Cossery (an Egyptian novelist who lived in the Hôtel La Louisiane, in Paris’s St-Germain-des-Prés, writing in French of Egyptian villagers and radicals) and Georges Henein (a cosmopolitan poet who exchanged letters with André Breton, while publishing against fascism).

The anti-fascist writings and artworks of Art and Liberty can also be seen as a reaction to the Egyptian monarchy’s reaction to Marxist activism and writing, and the second world war. Members of this group also stood in solidarity with artists deemed ‘degenerate’ in occupied Europe, who faced persecution. Art historian Sam Bardaouil says Italian fascist ideas, including futurism, had an impact on interwar Cairo and Alexandria. Surrealism offered a way to fight state violence, repression and suppression, sparking art that attacked fascism, war and traditionalism (5).

The painter Mahmoud Said, 1938, Adham Wanly

“Car-copter”, 1974, Hassan Sharif

Hassan Sharif Estate & Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde

“No Comment”, 1978, Hassan Sharif

Hassan Sharif Estate & Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde

The Art and Liberty Group shared themes and images with modern comic zines. The rough pen strokes of Kamel al-Telmissany (1915-72) and the raw stories in the drawings of his surrealist colleagues, are forerunners of the graphic novel comics published in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia in the past decade. Contemporary comics address politics through fictional or fantastical tales or self-reflective memoir, the techniques of Egypt’s surrealists. There is a similar grittiness in illustrations by Telmissany’s colleagues, notably Fouad Kamel (1919-73), in the short-lived Arabic-language Al-Tatawur and the French-language Marxist weekly Don Quichotte, along with exhibition catalogues from 1938-48. Their lines are simple, yet they have an irreverence and playfulness that prepared for the distorted reality of modern comic artists. It’s hard to say how widely Art and Liberty-inspired publications were read, but they were notorious among Egyptian and other Arab artists, and inspired new approaches.

Modern art and caricature, which both took off in the early 20th century, have always had a dynamic relationship in Egypt, even if Cairo’s cultural gatekeepers separated fine art from cartoons and comics (their satirical forms were derided as low art). Yet caricature has been fundamental to modern art, as can be seen in the work of the sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar (1891-1934), who shaped modern Egyptian art and was a caricaturist in so far as he simplified the likeness of his subjects.

Eye-candy for art critics

Many pivotal illustrators were fine artists too, like the painter Husein Bicar (1913-2002), who founded the popular Egyptian children’s magazine Sindibad in 1952. The One Thousand and One Nights and European folktales informed the aesthetic of proto-comics. Sindibad, which was reprinted in the 1990s, is still sold at old-fashioned bookshops. The classically trained Alexander Saroukhan (1898-1977) cartooned in top newspapers and magazines from the 1930s, where he drew the familiar pashas and recurring characters (some fictional, like Egypt’s everyman Al-Masri Effendi), loaded with symbolic meanings. Saroukhan skewered Egyptian leaders and statesman from the Arab world. His cartoon The Founding of the Arab League is more sequential than contemporary cartoons. (In his single-frame works, he anticipates the sequential narratives of later generations. Each illustration features whole worlds of politics, with casts of significant characters, useful to students of modern Egyptian history and eye-candy for art critics.)

Adham Wanly (1908-59), who with his brother Seif was closely associated with the emergence of modern art in Egypt, was better known for his art. He and Seif painted modernity: musicians, nudes, writers, the circus and ballet and other colourful milieus. The Egyptian ministry of culture has hundreds of his ink drawings in storage but only a few on display. The line that separates Adham’s caricature and his paintings is narrow: both contain exaggeration, humour and movement. His relationship to illustrations is straightforward: he started out as a newspaperman, drawing cartoons for Rose El-Yusuf, a mass-circulation weekly that launched in 1925 and continues to be published to this day, often with a caricature on the cover.

Albert Cossery by Kamel al-Telmissany

Centre Pompidou

“Mickey Mourns Gamal Abdel Nasser”, 2014, Ala Younis

The work of Abdel Hadi al-Gazzar (1925-65) makes us rethink the origin of Arabic comics. Gazzar, one of Egypt’s great modern artists, associated with the Art and Liberty Group, is known for his colourful social realism and dystopian visions; his depiction of folk life and mysticism was inspired by the Cairo district of Sayeda Zeinab, famous for its annual religious carnival, where he grew up.

Though Gazzar was not a comic artist, his work contains features of comic art. In January 2016 Cairo’s Modern Art Museum exhibited his pencil and ink drawings (which have received less attention than his canvases). His pen strokes project intense movement, a technique seen in comics, and some of his grotesques would not be out of place in contemporary zines or graphic novels. His characters are fantastical expressions of anxiety about the advance of technology. In more spiritual works, he incorporates cryptic lyrics, or pens over a finished painting, adding characters in the margins.

Gazzar even illustrated poems in a proto-alt-comic or a graphic poem. Like a comic artist, he played with words and images, recurring characters and the aesthetic qualities of a sketchbook. He saw his ink drawings as his strongest works. They have more in common with alt-comics from the Middle East today than the children’s magazines of the 1950s.

‘Traces of caricature’

Emirati artist Hassan Sharif (1951-2016) is best known for conceptual works acquired by museums such as the Guggenheim and Pompidou. From afar, some of his installations look like heaps of rubbish; others look like coral reefs trapped in a white cube. Up close, they are intricate arrangements of flip-flops or cotton, wood and wool. They comment on consumer culture and show mass-produced objects as ephemeral yet essential parts of everyday life. Sharif began his career as a political cartoonist. Before experimenting with fine art, he drew one-panel cartoons for the weekly newspaper Akhbar Dubai. In 1970-9, when Dubai was a port town, not a futuristic metropolis, he produced thousands of cartoons on events of the moment. These two aspects of his work seem irreconcilable yet there is, he noted, ‘a strong bond’ between them: ‘traces of caricature’ are present in his objects, and are a starting point for thinking through his work.

Looking at it, one can begin to consider what the conceptual and the cartoon have in common. Sharif’s simple lines express irreversible change and anxiety. In one of his cartoons, a man goes into a shop to buy American dates. Is the local product not good enough? The look on the shopper’s face is anxious, teeth grinding together: the correct product is the imperative. It’s an indictment of consumerism, a perspective articulated in his installations and objects. In a 2014 interview, Sharif described his objects‘as more ironic than any caricature that I did in the 1970s’ (6). He extracted the essence of gag humour and injected it into another medium.

Invitation to third exhibit of ‘Free Art’, Cairo, 1943

“Tok Tok” on sale at the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, 2015

Laura Cugusi

Sharif never returned to cartoons, but his recent writings show enduring concern about consumerism and technology. ‘How can today’s human verify his existence without at least sending one SMS a day?’ he asked (7). His cartoons document the origins of the emirates. Skyscrapers rise, and islands appear out of the blue. The city grinds to a halt with bumper-to-bumper traffic caused by two drivers chatting at a busy intersection. With prescient views of commercialisation, Sharif’s cartoons would not seem out of place now. ‘I am not inspired to draw any new ones, as the ones drawn decades ago still apply today,’ he told The National in June 2011 (8). ‘The same tyrants are refusing to leave their thrones, and the youth are still dreaming of a nation they can be proud of and have a say in.’ His cartoons and conceptual art are deeply intertwined.

Arab fine artists have done the same as Roy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons in re-appropriating comic imagery: there is something fundamental about the relationship between comics and art; sketches have strong connections to comics, and all canvases tell stories. A drawing by the Amman-based artist Ala Younis, exhibited at the Gypsum Gallery in Cairo, is a new way to consider the relationship. Younis took a famous cover of the comic Mickey, in which Mickey mourns Nasser’s death, and redrew it in pencil, a graphite depiction of a mass publication; its meaning changes. That a Mickey cover drawn by hand hangs in a top gallery begins to erase the distinction between art and comic art.

Jonathan Guyer

Jonathan Guyer is a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs and contributing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs.

(2) For a history of Turkish cartoons, see Efrat E Aviv, ‘Cartoons in Turkey — From Abdülhamid to Erdoğan’, Middle Eastern Studies, vol 49, no 2, 2013, pp 221-36.

(3) That groundbreaking, graphic narrative, Magdy El-Shafee’s Metro, is a hardboiled Cairo noir. The Arabic original is on sale in Cairo in its third edition, and has been translated into English, Italian, German and French (forthcoming 2017).